Tag: prioritization

March 7, 2024 – Say It To Make It Happen

March 7, 2024 /

I started off the week talking about how little I feel like I have accomplished this winter. The truth is, at that point I had a lot of irons in the fire and for quite some time. I didn’t have dedicated time scheduled to do any of the work and it seemed like each project was dragging on.

Wouldn’t you know that the log jam has broken. I finished my third duct. I have one more to go and it is a partial installation. It is still not done-done but the momentum is there as well as the desire. I was dreading the rewiring and the unknown. I also knew that once I started, I was committed and there were also limited stopping points. In addition to that, I brewed my next batch of beer. I went to the range for the first time in months. I did it all while weaving all my other obligations in at the same time.

I didn’t say those things to get me motivated. But, somehow by putting them front of mind, I found a way to push to the end. This is a technique that is very helpful when you want to get stuff done. It is one of the values of using a list. This puts tasks front and center of what needs to get done.

There is a psychological satisfaction of crossing things off the list for sure. But, the real value of the list comes down to the ability to triage and prioritize. Priority comes down the the time and resources we have, external deadlines and the desire to do it. The last one is subjective and can have a strong influence for me. My desire to do something my not outweigh the consequences of penalties on external deadlines.

That is all good and well but really I am talking about the power of committing to doing something. It is what makes ultra-marathoners complete the race, the person getting out of debt or the someone learn a new language. They put the goal first of mind and then develop habits around it.

If I were to say, ‘I’m going to get in shape’. Then I am going to evaluate my diet and my physical exertion. I am not going to get in shape if I do not make changes to support at least one of those two parameters. Each one of those things will have sub-steps and challenges unto their own.

Even if I change diet and add exercise, I still may not get into shape. I will be in a better position for sure, but to be in shape I need to do those steps with intent. Maybe to you in-shape means to finish a 5K or maybe it means finishing a 5K under 15 minutes. You need explicit benchmark goals to correctly evaluate whether you are on the right path.

Putting the goal of getting in shape front of mind means that I will have to research recipes or purchase food that in not described as cheese puffs. I means that I will have to dedicate some time a day or week to exercise. That has to become part of my calendar or schedule when planning other things. Or said another way, it has to become front of mind.

End Your Programming Routine: Mastering this is not easy. I haven’t done so. I also find that the older I get the more susceptible I am to desire. I desire not to do that so I pay someone to mow the grass. We all have these conflicts. The real secret is harnessing the time and resources we do have on the things that are important for us to do. Those are the things that we need to keep front of mind.

February 22, 2023 – Now that President’s Day Has Come and Gone…

February 22, 2023 /

We really have crossed the bridge heading into Spring and Summer. I know, you don’t really believe it but in most parts of the the United States, time is ticking for the garden season. Let me give some examples. It is time to prune fruit trees, grapes, roses etc. It is time to plant bare root plants for optimum summer/fall establishment and survival. It is time to start annual seeds.

At my house, my kids are in high school. That means that winter sports are at the very end and spring sports are about to start. This also means that planning for the schedules of the remainder of the school year. I was looking at the Trap schedule and getting practices/scoring weeks on my calendar. The state event is June 24-25. That means that I am actively looking at my summer calendar right now.

All is not lost if you don’t start seeds, it is not the end of a chance to plant a garden. My point with this is when you start to get in the mind frame of maximum production, that involves planning and it sneaks up on you faster than you think. To be 100% honest, I am not ready. My hangover from this trip has me backed up on things that need to be done first, like taxes.

My biggest problem is that I am already running behind. The things that I wanted to have done, like my sofa table are still not completed. I have to make the decision to either stop where I am at or not. At this point, I know myself and I know that if I stop focusing on my project the next time I think about it will be years later. This is why it took me years to build my fly tying bench.

In years past, I stopped on my winter projects and ultimately failed at finishing my projects and growing a garden. This year, I am going to try and do both, but I am also going to focus on finishing what I started first. At least, if things go well growing, I will be pleasantly surprised and not disappointed on two fronts.

I sound a bit defeatist by expecting that I won’t have a nice garden. The truth is, I believe that I can do almost anything that I want. I guess for me, I have relegated it to a lower priority. Would I delay writing here daily to keep a garden? Probably not. Would I skip going to the range monthly to work in the garden? Again, probably not. And so, knowing myself and my interests, I am likely going to deprioritize it.

In 2019, when I had all the time possible, I spent a lot of time building irrigation systems and planning to bigger and better. As fortune would have it, 2020 saw my entire summer consumed with remodeling and my beds destroyed. I have been on a downward spiral every since. Questions of long term inhabitation, location and best place have left me paralyzed with analysis paralysis.

With all that said, I think that it makes sense to focus on the things that I am certain I can perform well, like building my table. Ultimately, I also shouldn’t run my life on what might be. There is no guarantee that we will move just as there is no guarantee that a front yard garden is a detriment. But as long as there are other things to focus on, I suppose all these things will remain in the background as convenient excuses.

End Your Programming Routine: I want to say that if you are hoping to do something in the garden, this is the time that things get rolling. That being said, we all have to make choices in life. Just make sure that you understand that we can’t always have our cake and eat it too. So, understand where your limitations and priorities are and march ahead.

January 4, 2022 – New Year, New Plans

January 4, 2022 /

I won’t deny that I kind of checked out around Christmas time. Yes, I did some obligatory retrospectives and I think that there was a lot of value doing that, I also didn’t spend a lot of time looking ahead. I didn’t really want to, I wanted to make a fresh break.

Both last year and this year, I didn’t take any extra time off around the holidays.  Last year, I needed to work as much as possible.  This year, I didn’t have the time off to take.  I also happened to catch a sickness New Year’s Eve.  It was really mild, but I took the opportunity to just rest as much as I could (that is a story for another day).  

Now that I am feeling pretty much normal, rested (restless?) and the work week is starting, it is time to start getting serious about 2022.  What do I want to accomplish?  I am going to save most of that for myself this year.  But, I am going to talk about how I am going to go about things.

It is no secret that I dream of spending time on the range.  At the beginning of the year, I try to outline what I want to accomplish each month.  My going in proposition (or goal) is to try to get to the range once a month.  I have a running list of new things to work on so I have a supply of things that I attribute to each month.  It usually takes a little thought as well to orient hunting preparation before hunting season for instance.   

I do the same thing with my other projects.  In fact, they go on the same list.  I am not so neurotic that I schedule everything, but this is the basic technique that I use to push what I want to do for the year.  Often times,  things get moved around or one thing gets priority over other things, like building my office for instance got priority of most every other project.

The process is more dynamic than once a year.  As things get shuffled around, the items that get displaced get shifted.  In other words, the process is ongoing throughout the year.  Occasionally, I also change my mind an remove things, but that is pretty rare.  When that happens, it is something that perennially gets pushed and I ultimately decide that the project I really don’t want to do, hence the reason it gets pushed in the first place.

For example, I have had something on my list since 2005.  Under the kitchen crawlspace, there is a beam that supports the floor joists.  That beam has a post that rests on a foundation of a couple of bricks in the dirt (I am not sure if there is an actual footer or not).  The post itself is not treated and I highly suspect the post is taking water every year in the wet season.  The floor also has some sag to it.  It was one of my goals to jack the floor and raise or replace the post so that it does not eventually rot.  It is my belief that it is only a matter of time before this is a bigger problem.  but it is not enough of a problem that I have been motivated to do it.

There are other problems, like the foundation has failed around the kitchen.  We also have penciled around the idea of a kitchen remodel.  For those reasons plus it is not going to be fun or easy that project has been reprioritized.  Even though it is a matter of time before there is problem in that specific scenario, ultimately there is a larger project somewhere on the horizon.  After pushing this project forward over ten years, I removed it from my list a couple of years ago.

End Your Programming Routine:  There are no hard an fast rules, in fact I don’t schedule all year long because I know that things are going to change.  I have eight to ten months penciled out depending on what task I am looking at.  This is a way that I sort of guide how I want things to go as the year moves on.  Anytime is a good time to start something like this, I choose this time because it is a natural transition.

 

February 10, 2021 – What a wonderful mess

February 10, 2021 /

I missed the boat on learning linux/python/.php. I have enough programming experience to muddle around but I don’t have any of the fundamentals. My only real website building was writing straight HTML when I was in college but I don’t have a real understanding for the server structure, etc.

Back in my working days, I used to play around with Microsoft’s web hosting platform (IIS) and that was really difficult as well. There were so many nuances that the casual web user doesn’t really understand or have to deal with, such as browser caching. It seems so complicated and confusing enough that a reasonably technical guy doesn’t want to deal with it.

Today, I spent several hours trying to get this site back up. I violated the first rule of support which was to look at the simple things first. The site was working, but I had some SSL certificate errors which I tried to correct by removing the SSL. That spun me into all kinds of other problems when the real problem was simply to update a plugin for the site.

I suppose the beautiful thing about open source platforms is that there is so much knowledge just by searching on the internet. For a brief moment, I thought about trying to find a book like python/php for dummies. Now, that I have admitted to myself that it is harder than I thought, I would probably get some value by learning the fundamentals. Not today however, I learned what I needed to finish the job.

With so much information, we can’t know everything in a particular area. We can get bogged down in ‘toolbox fallacy’ and other paradigms rather than just learning the thing we need for the time and place. I suppose that if I am going to continue in this vein of content creation, it behooves me to learn some more. Right now, I have too much going on to warrant an investment of time right now.

I am starting a new job on Tuesday and still working on side work while finishing out Amazon. I have plans to build an office and that won’t be done for another month or so, at least. That is my outlook today.

September 23, 2020 – Fall is here

September 23, 2020 /

It feels like there are a lot of half done or almost done things around here. I have got apples in buckets waiting to get canned, I am halfway through last month’s book, the dog’s invisible fence wire is laying on the ground, the trailer is almost filled with a load to go to Habitat for Humanity, my leaf blower is kind of working, my dirt pile is waiting to get moved away from the house, the shop is almost cleaned up from my last project and I am in the middle of troubleshooting a new/used CD carousel as examples.

I have said multiple times that this is the harvest time and it very well can be the most busy time of year. Obviously, some things have a greater sense of urgency than others. For instance, the apples need to get dealt with in the next day or two. Items outside would be better served doing now before the weather turns. We are expecting rain for the next four days but we should get some nice weather after that. Temporarily, it seems like the outside to-do’s need to wait.

Sometimes I suffer from too many interests and a focus on the wrong priorities. Take for instance the CD player, I bought that on a whim at Goodwill and I figured at eight dollars, it would be no sweat if it really didn’t work. Well, it almost works, I replaced the belt to open the drawer and with a little finger pressure it opens and closes but not by itself. This leads me into a spiral of research and more testing. I keep thinking one more quick test before I move onto other things and pretty soon, those quick things add up to real time and certainly focus on the wrong things.

I also tend to be very single minded. I focus on one project to the exclusion of most everything else. Take for instance my remodeling project. That was everyday, all day. I suppose some of my urgency was knowing that was the kind of effort necessary to get it done it a timely fashion. However, I really did prioritize it over many things, including eating at times. I definitely couldn’t relax knowing how much work was to be done.

One thing that has usually worked for me is keeping a list of things that need to get done. That list get’s prioritized and then steps are broken up into subtasks on a calendar. I have had projects get stalled for years sometimes like when I built my potting bench. After I finally got tired of the lumber being in my way, I broke down the remaining to dos and assigned tasks into daily achievable milestones on the calendar. I gave myself about a month to finish and I completed the project in two weeks.

The advantage to using a calendar format is that it also integrates planning into all the other life commitments as well making a more realistic plan for completion. I usually only do it intensively for a couple of weeks out or the duration of one project otherwise it is too cumbersome to shift around on an Excel document frequently. The disadvantage is that it is time intensive. One of the reasons that I don’t use this format as much as I would like is that it takes a lot of time to plan successfully. I could probably spend thirty minutes a day going over this file if I tried. So, I try to set a rough plan for the week and adjust it next week.

I have been using this file since 2003. My active use waxes and wanes depending on how much I have to do and how much planning time I spend. There are times when I open it every day and there are times when I open it once every month. I just depends. I guess that this is my version of a project management program.

I feel like this would be a good mobile app to build, I would certainly use it. I would also be interested in hearing about other productivity tools. Let me know if there is something better out there with goalsetting and project management. As you can see, I have a lot of work to do.